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INSTEAD OF GOING TO SCHOOL, the teacher went into the woods.

In one hand she held the newspaper she’d just bought and in the other her leather satchel containing notebooks, corrected homework, pens, and well-sharpened pencils. She left the road unhesitatingly, as if the woods had been her destination from the start. Her loafers padded over a carpet of shiny brown leaves that looked like raw entrails.

She soon abandoned the satchel and the newspaper; at a certain point, her grip had loosened without her noticing. She followed one path for a bit, perhaps from muscle memory, and then left it and began ascending and descending the slopes. She felt she was going at great speed, and that the landscape was melting around her. Chestnuts, hazelnut trees, and birches were splotches, rivulets of color; the sky spilled over the outlines of the hills; the earth danced under her feet like a floating jetty.

The percussion of her feet on the level ground became a kind of drumbeat, urging her to continue. She heard the impact, but as if it were coming from underground; someone down there was knocking, forcing her to go on, chasing her away.

After many hours, tiredness compelled her to slow down. She was stumbling, her lips were sticky with saliva and she kept swallowing in an effort to get something down: it felt like she’d swallowed a bite that had become stuck in her throat, but it was her heart, tired out by the march. Her skirt was streaked with mud, her tights shredded by brambles.

The daylight was fading, by this time almost azure, blue. A half-moon materialized above the mountaintops. The teacher recognized the feeling of the cold night air, and it was that familiar sensation which restored a moment of clarity and allowed her to truly suffer.

She had climbed a hill called the Rovella, and from there she could see the village of Bioglio where she’d been born: the roof of the church, its bell tower, the lights going on one by one in the dusk. She saw them, but she couldn’t understand them. They seemed like the ruins of a forgotten civilization. She had gotten all the way up there without meaning to, urged on like a blindfolded prisoner. Her stomach was twisting with hunger, the backs of her shoes had rubbed her heels, and even her face hurt because she hadn’t stopped clenching her teeth and jaw the entire time. She couldn’t go down to her village, nor could she turn around: the hazy memory of her house and the people she knew terrified her.

She wasn’t afraid of the woods, though. She’d grown up during a time when they were used like fields and pastures. She’d been going there with her cousin from the time she was a girl, at night, too, to look for mushrooms. They’d gone out alone in the dark, pitch-black, climbing up the shortest, steepest road behind a clutch of houses clinging to the hill. They had a lamp and two sticks for holding back the shrubs and tapping at piles of leaves, a wicker basket with a handle for their treasures. The scent of mold was strong, and they knew how to follow the rot snaking between tufts of grass to find the wild mushrooms. Some of the enormous porcini made them swear for joy. The rest of the time they communicated by nodding and elbowing each other, holding hands only in exceptional cases (a badger too close, a painful slide on the backside, a sprain). They knew every twist in the path, the exposed roots, the eroded earth, the roe deer’s tracks and glades where they stopped to sleep, the abandoned dens of foxes, trunks gnawed by dormice. An ash-colored dawn arrived with a timid glow, making the treetops seem even blacker. They’d go there to collect chestnuts, too, cracking the burrs under their little boots.

It was October now. There were mushrooms, hidden, and chestnuts on the ground, but it was 1970 and she was forty-two years old.

The teacher turned her back on the village. She was trembling from head to toe, and within her chest she felt the flapping of wings in the branches like palpitations. She had a flickering memory of an abandoned cabin, an old shelter for animals and tools, its roof in a sorry state. She’d just have to drag herself to the top of the hill where the woods had overtaken the paths and bushes and the sweet acacias had suffocated the other trees. She grabbed at the heather to get back up the incline, directing her feet toward the crags.

The roof of the cabin had been cobbled together a few years before with prefabricated tiling, but since then no one had had the time or strength to keep back the vegetation. There were no stairs to get to the wooden loft and the branches of an acacia were poking through the tiny window. There was still straw on the ground, not all of it moldered, and in one corner old billhooks, rakes, and sickles.

The teacher staggered on, paying attention to nothing. She was dazed, and her eyes were seeing things that had nothing to do with where she actually was. As soon as she crossed the threshold she fell to the floor and stopped moving.